


Ofermod

by nestorius



Category: Beowulf (Poem)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:00:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22072177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nestorius/pseuds/nestorius
Summary: The prince goes swimming.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Ofermod

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/gifts), [ellen_fremedon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Gemyndelic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5141690) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



I didn’t think I was going to die until the fourth night. That’s when I was sitting on the upturned bell of my boat, chewing on my wrist; I’d caught a gash from the last sea monster, and I was so wet that it wouldn’t scab properly. I sat there, with the waters churning around me, and thought, well, if it won’t scab, it’ll get infected. Then I thought about how thirsty I was. I’d run out of drinking water the day before. The sea occasionally spat water into my mouth and that made me even thirstier. It wasn’t that cold, the sea water, but I started thinking, maybe it’d be better if it was cold. I’ve heard a freezing death is a good one. You just go to sleep.

So I thought that, about dying a freezing death, and then I cried. I didn’t give up, not there, I just cried. I cried so long and so hard that I didn’t notice the change in the texture of the water, or the squawking overhead. What brought me down to earth was the boat ramming into a rock. It belched and sank, and I screamed, and I flapped around wildly, and I was terribly frenzied, and then my feet found purchase on the bottom. I stood up, panting, and discovered the sea was only-waist-deep. I stood there, holding onto the rock and the remnants of my boat, til the sun came up a bit more, and then I saw which direction the beach was, and I swam there. Then I collapsed on the sand, and I cried some more.

Presently I heard footsteps, and I rolled over to see a man coming towards me. He was shouting, and as he got closer I could hear how he was shouting: up and down, the words bouncing and jumping. He was singing a spell, and he was making witch-signs with his hands, and I was offended that he was cursing me, probably as a sea monster, so I got up and I shook my finger at him. “I’ve been _killing_ sea monsters,” I yelled at him. “Stop it.”

He kept chanting as he drew nearer. He had a fishing spear in his hand but as he came down to the shoreline he saw my ruined boat. It was fairly obvious what had happened, so he stopped making witch-signs.

He spoke the language of the Island-Finns to me. I recognized it. Recognizing it didn’t do me much good. I knew, at that point, one word in the language of the Finns, and I only knew it because it was the same in the Geat language, and because it was funny. I said it, not knowing what else to say, and the man on the shore squinted his eyes at me. I said it again, just to say it, and he hit me hard on the mouth.

I had just called him a jackoff several times, so I guess he was allowed.

I was too tired from two days at sea to do much. I let my legs collapse, but I didn’t cry. The man loomed over me, and then he wrinkled his nose, and he pulled at my mail. My uncle had given me the mail for a present last autumn; I had been born in the autumn, and I’d come to fourteen of them. It was beautiful mail and very expensive and it had copper threaded around the wrists and at the bottom of the shirt. Breca had called me an idiot for wearing it, and he had complained loudly that I’d made him bring his mail and sword as well, but I hadn’t drowned, and a sea monster hadn’t bitten me in two, so there. The fisherman rubbed his finger on the copper at the hem, and then he poked at my earrings, which were small and golden, playthings before I’d get my arm-rings. I’d lost one on the first night. Then he toed at my sword, and at the remnants of the boat.

“Rooči,” he said.

I knew two words in the language of the Island-Finns, turned out.

The fisherman took my sword, as I suppose is reasonable, and my mail, which was also reasonable. He tried prising the rings out of my ears but I screamed and kicked him, so he stopped. They’re hard to get out anyways. He gave me a sack of water to drink, which I glugged down so fast that I nearly puked, and then he made me eat dried fish and birch-bark bread, which was disgusting but at least filling. I spent a night drying out at his hut, overlooking the sea, and the next morning he shouted a lot of Island-Finn bird-whistle noises at me and made me walk into the woods parallel to the beach, where there was a path. We walked for a long time, nearly the whole day, and about an hour before dusk we came to a fortress. It wasn’t a very big fortress but the accompanying docks were massive, and I saw more ships there than I’d ever seen in my life. The fisherman shouted at the men at the top of the palisades and they lifted a gate. The fisherman shouted at the men on the other side of the gate and they made a wide berth for us. I could see this wasn’t exactly a village, it was a fairground, with tents around the fortress itself. Seasonal, except for the fortress. Everything smelled badly of fish.

We went into the fortress, and I saw Breca. I could have cried at the sight of him – I thought he was dead, I thought he’d died when the first big waves swamped our boats. He looked like he’d been out of the water for a few days: tired and thin, but in a fine linen shirt that I’d never seen before. His hair had been combed and he hadn’t lost any of his earrings.

“Jumala-Nouli!” the fisherman shouted, and then he shouted a lot of other words. Breca and I were herded out of the fortress again, to a massive and beautiful tent. “Jumala-Nouli,” the fisherman said, and he knelt to the person inside. The person inside said, “Rooči!” 

This was the leader of the Finns, Jumala-Nouli. He was tall and narrow, and his hair was the sort that was so straight and thin that he hadn’t bothered putting it up; it fell sleekly around his shoulders. He had narrow eyes too, like they had been sharply cut from his face, and a very long beard. He had braided his beard impressively, strung with amber beads, but he hadn’t oiled it properly and it was so silky that it was coming out of the ties. He talked to the fisherman for a while, and then the fisherman went away. Jumala-Nouli pointed a narrow finger at me and said a lot of bird-whistle words.

“He wants you to name your heritage,” Breca said. “Tell him I’m your brother.”

“I’m not going to do that,” I said, insulted. I was proud of my heritage, as well I should be. I was not like Breca, who was of the Brondings, the Wave-Finns, whose father was merely part of a pack of soldiers of fortune clawing his way up, whose father did not have his fathers buried in the ship-graves, where they would sail well-fitted towards the gods. I was insulted enough that my own father had a similar story and I had to claim the ship-graves though my _mother._ I said, pointing at myself, “I’m Beowulf, I’m the son of the best of the Wægmundings, Ecgtheow, and my mother is Hereda Hrethelsdaughter, so my grandfather is Hrethel of the Geats, and my uncle is King Hygelac, who rules at Gotland.”

Breca translated all of this with his face pulled in a weird smirk, but I could tell Jumala-Nouli had recognized some of the names. As Breca spoke, Jumala-Nouli poked out his lips, and his narrow eyes narrowed further.

“Kuningas,” he said. “Ha!”

“You’re an idiot,” Breca told me. “You should have said you were my brother.”

 _“You_ should have told him,” I said.

Breca said, “Go fuck yourself, Bee, I wasn’t the fucker who said we should go out in the first place – ”

Jumala-Nouli watched us yell at each other, only stepping in when I tried to punch Breca in the mouth. He held us apart like you’d hold apart struggling kittens. He was smiling.

“You are both idiots,” he said, in very bad Geatish. “Do not lie.”

He sat us back on the tent floor, and I rolled over and hit Breca again.

“Fucking Rooči,” Jumala-Nouli said, delighted, and he left.

Being a hostage was very boring. Jumala-Nouli came in occasionally and he’d talk to Breca in the tongue of the Island-Finns, and I would take some small amount of pleasure watching Breca struggle to keep up. Jumala-Nouli was part Bronding and related to Breca’s father, they had the same great-grandfather, or something like that. I sat in the hut with Breca all day. We played string-games like little girls, and we ate whatever they gave us, which was usually fresh fish and oat cakes and a disgusting fermented green substance that Jumala-Nouli made fun of Breca for not liking. “It is the food of your fathers,” he shouted, and laughed. Thinking back on it I think it was some sort of kelp bread. Jumala-Nouli was very entertained by his good fortune, enough so that he’d bring us good wine. He’d taken my mail, or the fisherman had, but he let me keep the sword, and he gave me new clothes, including a new linen shirt with embroidery on the neck, which gave me a rather grim understanding of how expensive we would be.

After a week or so we were allowed to walk around the encampment, but only if Jumala-Nouli was with us, and he slapped me on the head when I tried to look at what the blacksmiths were doing. Occasionally a man who was fancy but not as well-fitted as Jumala-Nouli would come up to us at talk at Breca, who would either squinch up in embarrassment or try to talk in a clumsy, halting voice. Everyone ignored me, which was a first for my entire life. I seethed at them. They’d dressed Breca better than they dressed me, which wasn’t fair, and I wasn’t allowed to bring the sword out. By the second week I’d stopped wanting to walk around the encampment – I sat in the tent, steaming and drawing with a stick on the dirt floor.

About a month after our arrival, Jumala-Nouli came in and said “Come! Take a sword!” And I took my sword, and Breca didn't take his because he'd dropped it in the sea and we went out of the tent. Jumala-Nouli took us to the docks and pointed at a magnificent ship. “We go to Gotland,” he said.

“We do?”

“Look,” Jumala-Nouli said, and pointed at another boat currently being unloaded. Furs and gold, amber and spears. The men unloading it had a Geatish look on their faces.

“Thank you, little kuningas,” Jumala-Nouli said. He patted me on the head, and he laughed. “Stupid little boys!”

I kicked him, so he had me tied up on the deck for the first day of the journey.

“What were you thinking?” my uncle thundered.

Jumala-Nouli hadn’t called it ransom; I’m sure he framed it as a nourish-fee, or something, and I’m sure my uncle pretended it was a reward for saving me and Breca, and everyone went around smiling at each other. There had been a feast at my uncle’s hall, where everyone toasted each other and all of the Weather-Brondings, the Wave-Finn warriors who had once been mercenaries and were now oathmen in good standing at the hearth of elderly Hrethel, they pretended to be very happy to see a well-heeled cousin. Jumala-Nouli sat at the head of the table, looking quite smug. Then he left. It had taken a day but my uncle had flared up to incensed again. I stood in front of him, feeling quite small. Uncle Hygelac was a giant of a man and he leaned over in his throne. He had a fur cape on and it rode up on his shoulders, making him look like a ferocious animal.

“We were having a rowing contest,” I said.

“Breca tells me that was your idea,” Uncle Hygelac said, “to have it on the _sea,_ and to go _east –_ ”

“I killed monsters,” I said.

“You could have died,” Uncle Hygelac said. “It’s a wonder Breca didn’t die, and you know what, you know what that would have done, if he’d died and you’d come back alive?” He was shaking with anger. “That would have been a murder, you idiot, that would have been _my nephew_ killing the child of a man who had sworn himself to me – ”

“It would have been an accident, not a murder,” I said.

“Are you arguing with me? Now, of all times? Do you know I’ve had to pay ransom not just for you, but I’ve had to pay compensation to Breca’s father for everything Breca lost, his mail and his sword and everything. Do you understand that?”

“I slew sea monsters,” I said. I stood higher. “I went on an adventure, I survived the sea – how many people have survived the sea in a rowboat meant for one man, _while_ in mail, and scouted the fortress of the Island-Finns – ”

“By the great gods, you’re just as bad as your father,” Hygelac said.

I know he meant that in an exasperated way: he and my father had been great friends, kidding each other, fighting side by side. My mother, standing next to Hygelac, made a so-true face and snorted and rolled her eyes. She didn’t care, so it wasn’t an insult to her either. I knew that. And yet I did what I usually did, when someone pissed me off – I lunged. Hygelac let me pummel on his chest for a moment and then he smacked me, hard, right where the fisherman had smacked me, and I fell back and cracked my elbow.

“Take out his earrings,” Uncle Hygelac said to my mother, “and keep him out of my sight.”

I didn't lose all my inheritance that day, but I did lose a good chunk of it. I saw Breca around court a few times but he stopped talking to me, I think because his father made him. Which was just as well, I never wanted to talk to him again. The autumn came, the season I was born in, and I saw Breca at the festivals, in a new mail coat. I didn't get anything for my birthday. The holes in my ears closed up.

So, when Unferth brought that up, you can see why I got real mad at him.

**Author's Note:**

> Rooči is some kind of me-playing-with-the- Proto-Finnic version of ruotsi/rootsi (Finnish/Estonian for Swedish/a Swede/Sweden).
> 
> I am vaguely imagining the Island-Finns to be on Saaremaa and the Weather-Geats to be on the island of Gotland. I do not know where the Brondings are from.
> 
> Beowulf calls the fisherman _runkkari_ , which I have found out is not a word in Swedish but is one in another Norse-derived languge that means the same thing, so It Stays. Kuningas in modern Finnish is basically the same as it was in Proto-Norse so I'm keeping it. I took Jumala-Nouli from birch bark letter 292, presuming it means Arrow of God and because it starts with a J, just like Joanne the Scammer
> 
> (daniel ortberg lavery voice) dirtbag beowulf


End file.
